I just finished watching Mi Vida Loca and like usual I decided to do a little post movie trivia research. I found this interesting article about the idiosyncrasies of Echo Park and Chicano gang life that the movie failed to cover and in reading the article I saw mention of a movie called Salt of the Earth. I decided to go on netflix and add it my queue and that is when I saw the new feature tempting me to find out what “Members in and around Los Angeles, CA are currently renting”. So here are the top 25 DVD that Los Angeles residents are renting:
1. The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
2. L.A. Story
3. Mayor of the Sunset Strip4. Unscripted: The Complete Series (2-Disc Series)
5. Overnight
6. Coachella: The Film
7. Swimming with Sharks
8. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
9. Point Blank
10. Over the Edge
11. A Decade Under the Influence
12. At Home The Short Films of David Lynch
13. The Kid Stays in the Picture
14. The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film
15. Kramer vs. Kramer
16. Peeping Tom
17. Ellie Parker
18. Repulsion
19. The Long Goodbye
20. Stardust: The Bette Davis Story
21. End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
22. My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski Mein liebster Feind – Klaus Kinski
23. The King of Marvin Gardens
24. DiG!
25. Shampoo
Hmm, I’ve only seen three of those, and only one of them is something that I’ve gotten from netflix.
More than half of them are documentaries… I added a few of them to my queue that sounded pretty neat. … mostly old movies I’d never heard of. Gotta love netflix. The funny part comes when you search other zipcodes (OC for example) and other states… not quite as many interesting movies in those!
I think it would be much more interesting if #1 were The Cutting Edge.
So Angelenos are obsessed with movies about L.A., divorce, psychotic movie producers, movies about movies, Raymond Chandler, alcoholism and drug abuse, and sexually aberrant behavior.
Some absolutely great films here but, really, it looks like the movie marquee at the cineplex in Hell.
I love Mi Vida Loca. I know it sounds strange to include this one, but being Mexican myself I’m always drawn to films that show this side of us. I’ve been called the “white Mexican” all my life. My brothers and I were raised in an all white neighborhood and never got much exposure to other people of Latin heritage, outside of our extended family, until we were adults. When this film came out I had to visit Echo Park. I didn’t even live in LA at the time.
I once heard Anders on a radio show some years later and she talked about how some of the women in the film who were actual gang members were now dead. The interesting thing was she said they had to call a “truce” during filming because some of the women in the film who played characters in the same gang were actually in rival gangs.